In July of 1934, Adolph Hitler established the Nazi Party to become “Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor” of Germany and abolish the title of President, thus eliminating any form of democracy and creating a totalitarian state for Germany. The Nazis used a phrase, the " Final Solution to the Jewish Question" as a way to rationalize the horror that they bestowed. This man alone is responsible for the extermination of 6 million innocent people; primarily, however was not limited to, people of the Jewish religion. Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. Over one million Jewish children were killed , as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men. There was also mass extermination of people who were mentally ill, people who were homosexuals and Romani people(also known as gypsies), basically anyone who was not of the Aryan (white) race. The term "Holocaust", or Shoah in Hebrew, was used to denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by scholars and popular writers to refer only to the Nazi genocide of Jews. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state". The persecution and genocide was carried out in 8 stages:
1. The division between "us" and "them"
Jews born as German citizens were no longer considered to be Germans. It was now Germans/ Nazi's against everyone else. Those who fell into the category of "everyone else" were then divided into further sects to be discriminated against (i.e. Jews had a 6 pm curfew 7 days a week.)
2. Symbols forced upon the divided
The Star of David was used to depict Jews. They were forced to sew them to every garment of clothing and wear them at all times and would be severely punished, if not killed if they did not. Other symbols were triangles; pink symbolized homosexuals and brown symbolized gypsies. Black was antisocial prisoners, red was political enemies, green was habitual criminals, blue was foreigners and purple for Jehovah's witnesses.
3. Amplified reflection on inhumanity
The Nazis denied humanity to anyone not of their party. By denying victims the title of 'human', the mass killing of innocent people seemed much less
